Czech Beers . Seeing the Light

TheWife recently returned from a business trip to the Czech Republic. I made her promise that she'd birng me a couple of Czech beers, and she came through in spades! Today, I'll be chatting about the Pilseners she brought. Other beers and the herbal concoctions she brought back for me will have to wait.

Now, I know that Czech beer is rated quite highly in the world. After all, they invented the pilsener style. The pilsner style comes from Plzen, and Pilsner Urquell is, as the name says, the original beer from Plzen. And I'll bet it's damned good on tap. Unfortunately, they bottle it in green bottles. They do the same thing with the Budvar (the original Budweiser, no relation to Anheuser Busch's sex in a canoe beer). Green bottle storage means that Budvar tastes like... Special Ex. Yes, it's lightly hopped and, thanks to green bottles, lightly skunked. This is the reason I stopped buying imported beer. Inevitably, they package it in clear or green bottles, letting light hit the compounds extracted from the hops, and creating the scent and flavor of a skunks butt. Yum.

Please note that Pilsner Urquell is different from Budvar and Special Ex. Since it's more strongly hopped, it is more strongly skunked. The really sad part - I can tell the Urquell would be delicious if it had been kept from light. The head was goregous, tall, white and creamy. The beer itself felt creamy in the mouth, and there is a more than generous serving of hops in each sip. A lovely beer... if it hadn't been ruined.

Fortunately, we needn't suffer with beers damaged by substandard storage. There are a multitude of golden American beers with solid hop flavor, most of them packaged in brown bottles. I'd say that the bitterness of Pilsener Urquell clocks in a bit below Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. But Sierra Nevada puts their beer in amber bottles, preserving the 'Yum', and keeping the flavor of skunk rectum out of my mouth. Or for those who prefer an more local product (and who happen to live in Wisconsin, like me), I'd suggest Lakefront's Cream City Pale Ale. It's well-balanced, and came on the scene before the over-hopping that ruined many a beer really caught on.

So let's tally that up. Czech beers: 0 American beers: 2

Restaurant Webpages

Can anyone tell me why a restaurant wouldn't put up a web page? I can't conceive of a reason, but there must be one. Is it laziness? Technophobia? Secret desire to fail?

Just about every restaurant does ads in the yellowpages, but how many people are still using them? Whenever, and I mean WHENEVER, I consider going to a new restaurant or out to eat in a new area, I do a quick google search on them. A good web page will not only give me their location, their hours and their phone number, it give me a chance to see what their menu is like. And the menu is what can hook me.

Show me a good menu description (for instance cerca de cielo at Cempazuchi in Milwaukee - "Symbolic of the thirteen layers of the Mayan heavens, corn masa cakes are stacked with beans, spinach, squash, peppers and cheese on a roasted tomato salsa" [ed.- and oh my god, it's so good!]) and even if I don't hit your place this time, you'll stay in my mind for next time. If they're smart, it will also show me a map of their location, and maybe a shot of the front of the place.

It's just good business. There are a variety of operators that have frameworks ready to go - just dump in your info. And I can't see how a simple website with menu, hours and pictures, with a nice domain name would run you much. I'll bet you can lock it down for less than the cost of an inch of column space in the yellow pages. And not doing it because of the cost is self-defeating - you'll be at such a competetive disadvantage if you don't. So PLEASE! for the sake of my dining pleasure, put up a website for your restaurant. Don't be a dolt.

OK, that's it!

I’ve held my tongue long enough. Dark forces are afoot in this land, wolfish forces masquerading as green sheep. “How do you know this, Fishmonger?” you’ll be asking. “Whatever can we do about this menace?” you’ll ask, your voice quavering. And well that you should. But fear not, for The Fishmonger will tell you. Oh yes, I will tell.

These Dark Forces to which I referred take the form of – wait for it- people telling you to conserve paper for the good of the (I have to laugh - ha! ha!) environment! I laugh because I know (as do they) that nothing could be better for the environment than routine production of paper.

First a brief aside. I am not, of course, talking about paper produced from wood from old-growth forests. I am not talking about this paper because, as far as I am aware, NO SUCH PAPER EXISTS! Why would any sane person reduce a majestic old-growth tree to paper, when much more profitable avenues for the disposal of such trees (for instance, turning it into large boards and timbers) exist.

Yes, paper is made of junk trees. Or, more likely, farmed trees. These are trees grown as an agricultural commodity, like wheat, or beets, or ginseng. Cutting down trees planted for the purposes of paper production is no more wasteful of the resource than harvesting wheat for the purposes of making flour. If you are one of those few individuals who feel that wheat should be left to grow and shed its kernels in the natural order of things… let’s just say that I have nothing more to say to you on this topic. Go away. Now.

For the rest of us who are, perhaps, saner (though I don’t know to what degree), I will proceed by asking a question: what is the most pressing environmental issue of the day? Well, I might argue with you that it is the mysterious deaths of amphibians, or the sudden loss of countless honey bees. But the general consensus seems to be that the most pressing environment issue of the day is global warming. And this global warming is generally laid at the foot of greenhouse gasses, especially carbon dioxide. In fact, there exist a multitude of website that will help you calculate the amount of carbon dioxide that your existence puts into the atmosphere, and even plant trees as a means of offsetting that. You see trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air and fix it as part of their substance. This would be useful if trees didn’t then decay (through rot or fire) and release that same carbon back intot he atmosphere.

What is needed is a means to sequester carbon. Some have proposed fertilizing the ocean so that algae will grow, then sink to the ocean depths where it will not decompose for ages. I propose that a similarly useful means of sequestering carbon is to bury it in a modern sanitary landfill. It is well known that modern landfills provide very little opportunity for decomposition of dry materials. Food scraps may decompose, but newspapers buried 60 years ago show little or no decomposition. Therefore, the means to combat global warming is obvious. Print out lots of unnecessary documents, then throw them out moments later. The paperless society would doom us! We need to use paper, and lots of it, then throw it away. Sure, our watersheds will be ruined, but our climate will be saved! Paper or plastic? Paper, please! Let’s not save our trees, let’s cut them down, make them into paper and bury them! Dump a log, save the planet!

(PS: information presented as fact in this blog post has likely been completely made up, in the tradition of america's government and news sources. Thank you.)

Robotic flies

Call it a proof of concept, or a taste of things to come. A Harvard research group has designed a robotic fly. OK, really it's just a pair of fly-sized robotic wings... but still. How far can we be from free flying, programmable robotic cameras? It's only a matter of time.

Now. Everybody go and read Transparent Society, and then write to your congresscritters. It's still not too late.

(read the first bit here, then you'll see that you need to buy the rest).

Begone!

On Abbott...

An open letter to the people of Thailand, French AIDS activists, and all those who think Abbott Labs is terrible for actually charging people for it's products:

You're a bunch of idiots. By taking these actions against Abbott, you're actually hurting victims of AIDS. You see, Abbott Laboratories (and pretty much every other pharmaceutical company) is a business. That means they make products and attempts to sell them for a profit. Pharmaceutical companies were traditionally big money-makers, and they still are, but their profit margins are shrinking. You may think this is great, but it turns out to suck for those with AIDS.

You see, when profit margins shrink, R&D dollars shrink, too. That means fewer drugs will be developed, and the choice of which drugs to fund becomes more critical. So Abbott needs to decide: do we try to find a good drug to fight, for example, osteo-arthritis, or do we look for a drug to fight AIDS? Hmmm... one of these will target a growing and profitable market of the 'aged', the other will target a market that is increasingly overseas and low-income. Now a company might decide to try for the AIDS drug anyway. Developing a successful AIDS drug brings prestige, and the market in developed nations is still strong. But if offering an AIDS drug becomes a liability, there is little incentive to develop such a drug.

Perhaps the idiots, once they've successfully stopped capitalist experimentation on AIDS drugs, will start their own non-profit pharmaceutical company. Perhaps they'll sink their life-savings into a research co-op and find a cure for AIDS which they'll then distribute for free to the world. But I doubt it.

PS: This is a personal diatribe. It reflects only my opinion, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of my planet, nation, state, village, industry, employer, insurance company, favorite cereal manufacturer or any other organization to which my feelings might be attributed.